I've been trying to piece together the answer from lots of posts, comments, etc, but I just can't work out the current situation. Is Zotero able to import and handle patent (and patent application) references from the main databases? I imagine directly accessing one of the 'umbrella' search engines (e.g. SumoBrain, FreePatentsOnline, PatentLens, Google Patents, etc.) would be a way to solve this. It is not useful to have US patents handled one way, PCT applications handled another way, etc. Can anyone help me with this question?Thanks,Paul

Zotero definitely supports Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline, at least. I think it has some more too. Just install Zotero and see what works for you. If there are inconsistencies between the databases, post and we'll see what can be done.

Some of us are working on uniform support for legal resources, with experimental versions of the CSL citation language schema and the Zotero client, over on the CitationStylist site. This is development work, and so not perfectly stable at this point, but it's intended for eventual adoption (in some form) by the main projects.

With those caveats, it might be worth a look going forward; we're aiming for a standard layout of data in Zotero law-related items that will render correctly across a range of legal styles (OSCOLA, the Australian Guide to Legal Citation, the New Zealand Law Style, the McGill Guide [French and English], and that thing with the blue cover managed by the Harvard Law Review).

I've now installed Zotero (I uninstalled it about a year ago), and have tried, but still can't make it work with patents. To test, I picked one patent, and tried to add it to Zotero using 4 methods (I'll list them in the order they appear in the screenshots):

(three out of four methods created a sub-item, too, so these three have two screenshots)

As you will see, very little data was brought into the Zotero items. Method 1 was the best, but still didn't import something as basic as the Patent Number, let alone the abstract! Can anyone offer any advice on what I'm doing wrong, or why there is so much inconsistency?

And on Google Patents Zotero is just using its Embedded Metadata translator, which also saves pretty generic data (varying by the site, but limited to a few basic fields), rather than the dedicated Google Patents translator, which is probably out of date if it's not being triggered. You can hover over the address bar icon to see what translator Zotero is using.

Ajlyon - FPO is working better now, although "filing date", which is very important in the patent world, is not coming through. I tried it on a US patent application, and a PCT (WIPO) patent application, too. I've noticed that publication date is being saved as "issue date", which is incorrect in all cases, and additionally, makes no sense in patent applications, which are never "issued" (as opposed to granted patents). However, that's probably not as important as a reliable and consistent filing date.

FPO is updated to do filing dates as well. The Google Patents link is working for me. Have you tried restarting Firefox? That may help with the Google Patents one, since I changed its target expression.

there is something wrong with the translator repository so you're not actually receiving updates anymore. It's probably best to just wait until tomorrow (or later today if you're on Asian/Australian/European/African time)

FPO seems to be working now! To the right of the filing date and issue date, appears "y m d", which I assume is meant to be the date format. However, the issue date is the US format of "09/28/2004". Any comments about this?(yes, Google Patents still appears to be broken)

Thought I'd try again, but no luck with Google Patents. However, there's not really any need to use GP, as FreePatentsOnline has everything that GP has, plus more - and the translator is working really well.Ajlyon - thank you for fixing it. I think that my main concern with Zotero is that translators seem to work intermittently - I'm always concerned that I won't notice that the 'grabbed' data is not complete/correct, and that, when I go back to use them, I'll find many refs to be problematic.

we're in the process of implementing a systems that will alert us to such problems.In most cases, though, translators will break rather than get worse, so you wouldn't just get a little less data, you'd get an error message. I don't think that should be a major concern (also, just in general it makes sense to check the data Zotero imports - there are very few databases you can trust 'blind' and the patent ones certainly aren't among them.)

What I would want to flag as a major concern for anyone working with patents is that at this time, citation output for patents is severely lacking. Frank is working on this as noted above and a less ambitious fix is in the works, too, but right now csl doesn't have variables for several of the most basic patent fields, so they cannot be cited - see the table here:http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/patent.htmlAll fields with "none" in the right hand column can currently not be cited.

adamsmith - thank you. I recently moved from academia into patent law, and have been very surprised at the lack of consistency and structure in patent documentation. One thing I would say about that table, and I mentioned it above, is that the Zotero label for "number" should be "Patent/Publication number", as the publication number for patent applications (which are therefore not "patents", at least not yet) appears in this field.

The formatting of patent cites varies between styles, so we'll need some concrete guidance here. What style are you using (edit: CMS Note, sorry for missing that), and what form does it specify for a reference to a patent (if you can provide a link to the style guide that would be helpful) (edit: CMS incorporates The Bluebook by reference; shall we assume that the examples below are correct for your context?).

The Bluebook diverges from other styles in most things, but it is the base on which citation styles of US courts are built. The 19th edition (thanks Sean!) provides this example in Table T1.2 at page 220:

That's clear, thanks. In the short term, the mappings needed for several things (issuing jurisdiction, filing date, other things in the right panel that might be relevant to a cite) are not yet mapped to CSL (that is, the data is not sent to the citation processor, so there is no way to render it in a citation). That's a bit of a sticking point.

If you're willing to test things for development, the legal style extensions that I'm working on in the MLZ project will be able to handle this (the cite forms would need to be implemented, but that's not much trouble). With some adjustments to a site translator or two, the system should work to grab patent records and cite them correctly into a document. If that sounds interesting, let me know; I'm looking at adapting one or more of the Chicago styles to the MLZ version of the style language (it's broadly compatible with the official version, but fussier about some details). If there is active interest, it will raise the motivation to do the work.

tnemeth - what Frank says - see also my last post in the Chicago-Author date thread you link to. I'll be happy to help implement patents once we have the necessary variables and mapping. This is not trivial not least because it involves csl, which in turn affects multiple reference management programs, so it won't happen tomorrow.

@Paul - changing that label is relatively easy, on the other hand, I'll see if we can get this started.

Yes, I am definitely interested in testing this - as long as it is reasonably stable. I'll install the client and will try to familiarize myself with the differences. Though unrelated, OSCOLA is also something I have use for so I'm following these developments too.

@adamsmith

Thanks for that, for the time being I am quite happy to work around manually as I don't have a large number of patents, but I'll follow the developments here.

Wow - a lot of movement since I last checked in! I'm not sure about formal styling for citations in a bibliography, but a typical shorthand style used by patent attorneys would be (the brackets are my explanation, not the formatting):

US 1,234,567 to Smith (the patent number of a US Patent - i.e., granted)

US 2011/1234567 to Smith (the application number of a US Patent Application)

WO 2011/1234567 to Smith (the publication number of a WIPO (PCT) Patent Application)

US 60/123456 to Smith (the application number of a US Provisional Application - perhaps don't worry about this type at first)

Note, the 'punctuation' of the numbers above are often done differently for technical reasons. For example, although the USPTO uses forward-slashes (/), this causes a problem in file systems, so people often replace the slash with a hyphen (e.g., US 2011-1234567), or with nothing (e.g., US 20111234567). Also, commas in the number (e.g., separating thousands) are sometimes included and sometimes not.

I look forward to hearing your progress! Thank you for putting in all this effort!

I would like to work out support for patents. The coding itself won't be too much trouble, but it sounds like references might adopt a variety of styles. These will need to recombined with various general styles ... I wonder if we can work out a typology, to help keep things straight with the naming of styles, and the tagging of styles for functionality.

So far we seem to have a Bluebook variant, the CMS style, and a shorthand style. Are there any gateways in legal process involving patents that have strict and well-defined standards for formatting (court filing requirements, reporting standards to national or international bodies)? Also, in general terms, is the field controlled (or afflicted) by strict citation standards, or do practitioners adopt a rule of reason, swinging with the author's chosen citation form so long as it fits common conventions closely enough to be easily interpreted?

Before starting to code this into styles, I'd like to work out a picture of the overall pool of facilities we're trying to build.

A question: are assignees relevant to a citation? If so, should they simply be subbed in for the inventor, or should they be noted separately in the cite in some form?

I see that the Inventor field is not yet mapped. I'll come up with a way to work around that in the short term, so we can get started building a style that supports this material, but in the meantime guidance on the use of the Assignee info will be good to have.

Great, we now have four possible citation formats. :) I guess the simplest way to move forward will be to incorporate patent cite support into a particular style when someone makes a specific request, and kind of wing it elsewhere. The notes on Chicago above are clear, and it looks like assignee info can be spliced into the samples more or less gracefully. I'll start there. More and better particulars when something emerges ...

Hello there.Don't want to sound rude at all, but what is the status?Specifically I need to export the patent info in bibtex format. Any citation format could work me: I need them for my PhD thesis so I'm pretty free with regard to the style.

Yes, I did check it.Even though in zotero all the info are nicely present, after exporting in bibtex most of the fields are missing:title -> titleinventors -> authorsabstract -> abstracturl -> urlyear -> year

and that's it.

The biggest issue, I think, because it is exported as @misc instead of @patent which has the proper field to fill.

I found the bibtex.js file, but I have no javascript knowledge. Any help would be appreciated about this.

sure - I would have asked about that before submitting this for general use. But putting in a couple of extra mappings isn't a lot of work, I was going to just do a quick custom version for drago and then see how/if we can use some of those more generally.

I fully agree on the idea to have a more strict methodology to map fields.I'd like also to highlight that even though @patent isn't an official type, it starts to be a standard 'de facto' (i.e. it is included in JabRef & Co.).

I think that mapping the fields as suggested in the link proposed by noksagt will make most of the user happy (and my PhD thesis a lil' less painful) :)